‘Green Website’ – how to reduce your readers’ CO2 emissions with Online Leaf

The eagle-eyed among you will notice a new ‘Green Website’ badge in the right sidebar of the site. So what does it mean? Well, because browsing the Web consumes a lot of energy on a global level, Online Leaf has developed a method to reduce the amount of energy needed to browse the internet, by making websites more energy-efficient.

The WordPress Online Leaf plugin which you can download here installs an energy-saving standby engine on your blog, and it is said by the developer to be a simple matter to run the code on other websites as well. The engine automatically activates a dark screen when site visitors are inactive, darkening colours and hiding animations and effects, so that the monitors displaying the site don’t waste energy generating these visuals. Dark colours, on many monitors, use less energy in being displayed than brighter ones.

The stated goal of the developer is to reduce the overall CO2 emissions produced by displaying websites, without any loss of visitor experience. By running the plugin you are actually saving energy for your readers. Although the amount of energy saved per reader is extremely small, it adds up when you consider how many people visit not only your site but others with the same engine installed.

You can still use visual effects, animations and heavy graphics to improve your website’s overall functionality and aesthetic appeal, and screen-reading softwares for the visually challenged, because the standby engine does not conflict with any of those things (it is only activated when your visitors are inactive, that is, when the page is being displayed but the reader is on a different tab in his or her browser, or has gone away from the computer).And a quick nudge of your mouse or trackpad brings everything back in a fraction of a second.

It might not seem to make much of a difference, one blog, one visitor, maybe just a few seconds of energy saved. The idea, though, is that this is an initiative to be taken up by as many website owners as possible, some getting just a handful of visitors a day, others thousands or even millions. If every website in the world conserved energy in this way, the savings would be colossal. An impressive start would be if the likes of wordpress.com, Google, Facebook and Twitter made use of the standby engine. But every energy-saving website, no matter how small, helps us all change and become more aware of the need to reduce our energy usage.

So, if you are responsible for maintaining a website, please consider installing Online Leaf today.